The tourism industry is under intense pressure to change: demand cycles are becoming shorter, booking channels more fragmented, and price fluctuations more dynamic. At the same time, expectations for a seamless, personalized customer experience are rising, from the initial search impulse to the return home. To survive in this environment, more than just individual initiatives are needed: a clear strategy is required that combines customer experience, target group understanding, and data expertise to make decisions more reliable.
Why is this strategically relevant? Because good CX not only creates satisfaction, but also stabilizes business models: those who understand their guests precisely can consciously shape the decisive moments along the journey and condense data into actionable insights. This leads to greater relevance in communication, less friction at critical touchpoints, better control of capacities and prices, and thus measurable effects on repeat purchases, recommendations, and quality of results. CXM in tourism is thus evolving from a “nice-to-have” to a management tool.
From our work, we know which levers consistently make a difference without requiring a “major operation”: Target groups are not described abstractly, but are refined along concrete decision-making logic. The customer journey is not extended additively, but orchestrated: with a view to the moments when effort, quality, or churn risks are decided. And data is not collected, but connected: with clear terms, a focused set of KPIs, and analytics where they answer a CX question. This creates a control loop that works in volatile markets and creates space for AI that does not optimize in isolation, but strengthens the experience as a whole.
With this perspective, we would like to contribute to the debate: CXM in tourism is not a trend topic, but a response to structural challenges: from price pressure to capacity control to channel complexity. In the coming months, we will share experiences from projects, key questions for self-diagnosis, and insights into where the triad of target group understanding, journey design, and data & analytics has the greatest leverage. Not as a recipe, but as guidance for companies that see customer experience as a strategic task and want to make it effective in their everyday business.